Report spotlights racial transformation in Brockton since 1990

Monday

Number of black residents has tripled, while nearly half of whites have left.

BROCKTON — A recent report studying demographics in the Commonwealth put the spotlight on the City of Champions as one of the state’s most extreme cases of racial transformation in the past 30 years.

“Changing Faces of Greater Boston,” a 71-page study published last week by the Boston Foundation, indicated that nearly half of Brockton’s white population has emptied out of the city since 1990, a time when nearly four out of five residents were white.

In the almost 30 years since, the number of Brockton’s black residents has more than tripled, drawing level with the share of white residents at just under 40 percent. A significant portion of those black residents, about 41 percent, are foreign-born, coming mainly from Cape Verde and Haiti.

UMass Boston researchers Barbara Lewis and Rita Kiki Edozie, who co-authored the report’s "African Americans in Greater Boston" section, cite housing prices as a major driver of black migration to the city.

Specifically, they mention a population of residents displaced by gentrification in Boston’s historically black neighborhoods who are seeking affordable housing elsewhere in the region. Brockton, where the average single-family home costs about half the price of its Roxbury counterpart, has become a premier destination for those real estate refugees, they say.

“Blacks have had good reason to be attracted to Brockton,” the report reads, “The city is close to jobs, has an excellent public bus system and offers relatively affordable housing, including rental stock, close to Boston.”

To back up their claim, Lewis and Edozie cite a “striking” 2017 analysis of mortgage lending by the Massachusetts Community & Banking Council that found Brockton alone accounted for nearly one in five home loans to black people in Massachusetts. That’s almost twice the number of loans black people received for homes in Boston, even though Boston is seven times larger.

Multiple experts, including Lewis and Edozie, cited Brockton’s relative affordability and proximity to Boston as this phenomenon’s cause. James Campen, the UMass economist behind the MCBC mortgage analysis, thinks the story is a bit more complicated.

“Clearly Brockton’s not the only big city near Boston that’s affordable,” he told The Enterprise. “A lot of Latinos without much income live in Lynn. Blacks don’t go to Lynn.”

Campen stopped short of accusing banks outright of redlining black people into the Brockton area, despite his findings that even high-income black homebuyers are more likely to be denied mortgages than their white counterparts. Instead, he said more internalized forms of discrimination produced the stark settlement patterns we’ve witnessed in the past 30 years.

“We live in a segregated society,” said Campen, “There’s a lot of social forces producing that segregation.”

“If you go to a broker and say, ‘I want to buy a house,’ if you’re white they probably won’t show you a house in Brockton and if you’re black they probably will,” he said. “This happens subtly, more or less.”

Mortgage lenders also discriminate, Campen said, though it’s hard to measure how much. The economist thinks a series published last year by the Reveal Center for Investigate Reporting overstated the extent to which racism explains the gap in acceptance rates between black and white loan applicants.

Reveal’s study, which claimed 61 metro areas across the U.S. showed clear signs of discriminatory lending practices, compared whites and blacks with similar incomes. What it didn’t do was control for an applicant’s debt or family wealth, which Campen said are two of the most important factors a bank considers when issuing a mortgage.

Wealth itself, though, has a lot to do with race. “Changing Faces of Greater Boston” indicates that the average black household in Massachusetts made about $45,000 less than the average white household in 2017. Lending discrimination aside, such a large disparity in income plays a huge part in where people of different races can afford to live.

Still, that hasn’t stopped the Greater Boston region from growing more diverse over the past 30 years. Between 1990 and 2017, the report found that every one of Greater Boston’s 147 cities and towns saw an increase in the non-white share of its population, with Brockton boasting some of the most dramatic changes.

Veronica Truell, a homebuyer education trainer at Housing Solutions for Southeastern Massachusetts, said its likely the preferences of buyers themselves that have made Brockton such a popular destination for people of color. Truell said she's helped many aspiring homeowners of color purchase their first properties in the city, and she's watched many of her own friends do the same.

“It’s like any other migration, right?” she asked. “Your friends go, they tell you about it, you visit a lot. Next thing you know, you’re there.”

Staff writer Ben Berke can be reached at bberke@enterprisenews.com. Follow him on Twitter @Enterprise_Ben.

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